Links, Wednesday 28th September

Fascinating history of the trade relations formed between Elizabeth I's England and the Islamic powers of Morocco, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, often formed on the basis of military cooperation against the Catholic powers of Western Europe.

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Sometimes two wrongs DO make a right

"The day Ahmad Khan Rahami allegedly planted two bombs in Chelsea — one of which detonated on West 23rd Street — two thieves accidentally helped to disable his second pressure cooker bomb left inside a rolling suitcase on West 27th Street, sources said.

The young men, who sources described as being well-dressed, opened the bag and took the bomb out, sources said, before placing the explosive into a garbage bag and walking away with the rolling suitcase."

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Some great, practical policy ideas for reduce our collective dependence on cars

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"If an insurer had simply decreed Taylor’s back surgery to be unnecessary, and denied coverage, the Taylors would have been outraged. But the worst part is that he would not have got better. It isn’t enough to eliminate unnecessary care. It has to be replaced with necessary care. And that is the hidden harm: unnecessary care often crowds out necessary care, particularly when the necessary care is less remunerative." New Yorker

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This is great news. A way of controlling rat populations humanely - sterilising them instead of killing them!

"ContraPest, the finished product, is viscous and sweet. Electric pink and opaque, it tastes like nine packets of saccharine blended into two tablespoons of kitchen oil. “Rats love it,” Dyer said. “Love it.” Mayer, who taste-tested every version during the development process, could not say the same for herself."

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:D

"Someone always says it, whenever it comes up:

“I guess I’m just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!”

Well.

Yes.

It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote

all us women

and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone

ever again.

This vote is legally binding."

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Wow, it turns out there's still more to be learnt about the Second World War and the Nazi regime.

"Was Blitzkreig, then, largely the result of the Wehrmacht’s reliance on crystal meth? How far is Ohler willing to go with this? He smiles. “Well, Mommsen always told me not to be mono-causal. But the invasion of France was made possible by the drugs. No drugs, no invasion. When Hitler heard about the plan to invade through Ardennes, he loved it [the allies were massed in northern Belgium]. But the high command said: it’s not possible, at night we have to rest, and they [the allies] will retreat and we will be stuck in the mountains. But then the stimulant decree was released, and that enabled them to stay awake for three days and three nights. Rommel [who then led one of the panzer divisions] and all those tank commanders were high – and without the tanks, they certainly wouldn’t have won.”"

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The colonial terror in the Belgian Congo - under the authority of Leopold II and the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company - was almost unimaginable in its scale and sheer cruelty. I couldn't help but cry looking at some of these images.

[EXTREMELY UPSETTING CONTENT, including murder and bodily mutilation]

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Sepsis is a major killer, but ordinary people are not trained to recognise it in the way they are for heart attacks. It's worth learning to spot it!

"The first step is to teach people to seek treatment quickly when a loved one begins to show symptoms of sepsis, which include chills or fever; extreme pain or discomfort; clammy or sweaty skin; confusion or disorientation; shortness of breath; and a high heart rate."

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"faculty will bend rules, knock down walls, and build bridges to hire those they really want (often white colleagues) but when it comes to hiring faculty of color, they have to ‘play by the rules’ and get angry when any exceptions are made. Let me tell you a secret – exceptions are made for white people constantly in the academy; exceptions are the rule in academe" Washington Post

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Had a proper lightbulb moment reading this

"The intention was that Solitaire would get a generation of computer users still most familiar with a command-line input to teach themselves how to drag and drop, without realizing that's what they were doing. The fact that we're still dragging and dropping today suggests that it worked rather well."

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This whole concept was totally new to me

"Unlike most computer code, which is written informally and evaluated based mainly on whether it works, formally verified software reads like a mathematical proof: Each statement follows logically from the preceding one. An entire program can be tested with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems."

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Whatever Corbyn's weaknesses as a politician (and I acknowledge that there are many), at least he does not stoop to the sort of dog-whistle garbage that his Labour opponents are willing to spout in the name of 'electability'.

Links, Tuesday 13th September

[CN: for violence and family abuse]

"When I was high on LSD it allowed me a glimpse at how to deal with the problems I was having, like opening a drawn curtain. For the first time I realised what had happened. It wasn't my fault, none of it was. It was an eye-opening experience. For me, taking LSD – and talking and thinking about what had happened to me – was actually quite a cherished experience. It made me open to other things: one of the effects was to make me a lot more responsive to the therapy sessions I was going to. I found it easier to approach my problems in therapy, because I already had done so on LSD." Vice

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Oh dear, it seems the classic "the physical act of smiling makes you feel more happy" study has failed a major attempt at replication.

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This research is a really important example of how much toxic gender norms still continue to screw things up for us. Basically, heterosexual people are still unwilling to enter into long-term monogamous relationships in which the woman earns as much or more than the man. The consequence is that people at higher social classes (where there tends to be more income inequality by gender) marry more frequently and, in couples where the earning *potential* of each partner is comparable, the women tend to reduce their labour force participation.

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Nice one :)

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Haha, this is amazing! I want to play! :D

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Interesting. Why Apple and other big tech companies pay much less for information about exploitable bugs in their software than that same information fetches on the malware black market.

"If Apple or other defense bounties tried to outbid or even match offense bug prices, they may lose the employees they need most to fix the issues,"

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Wow, so beautiful

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Not sure what to make of this, tbh

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Statistics is weird. Also: is there a "hot hand" in basketball?

"The probability of getting tails on any individual flip is, of course, always 50 percent. But when you have a finite number of coin flips — or shot attempts, or any other probability-based event — the sequences with consecutive identical outcomes can only be arranged in so many ways. As a result, a given flip of heads is more likely to be followed by tails than by another heads."

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This is quite an important point, and something I haven't thought about enough. There can definitely be a downside to being given formal title to land you informally occupy!

"When property rights are transferred to very poor people, preserving legal tenure will likely entail onerous expenses in the form of attorney and public notary fees, and courts costs. In addition, these charges are higher in relative terms in very unequal societies where the gap between the poor and the relatively well-off is wider."

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An overview of zoning rules in Japan, which are far more rational than what you see in the US or UK.

"Japanese do not impose one or two exclusive uses for every zone. They tend to view things more as the maximum nuisance level to tolerate in each zone, but every use that is considered to be less of a nuisance is still allowed. So low-nuisance uses are allowed essentially everywhere. That means that almost all Japanese zones allow mixed use developments, which is far from true in North American zoning."

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"Is Simeon the fastest athlete from the Marshall Islands? There’s no real way of knowing. But he’s a pretty good athlete who lives in a city with facilities and coaching most Marshallese would have to uproot their lives to access. And so he was the country’s best Olympic hope." SB Nation

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New word for the day :D

"It’s a reproductive strategy known as “kleptogenesis”—essentially, reproduction by theft."

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Wow, this is horrendous. I've just removed my phone number from my facebook account, though maybe it's too late already!

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"If the DA wants to attract the attention of rural South Africans, it should campaign to have the question of tenure on communal land settled once and for all. It should come out against unholy alliances between chiefs, corporations and politicians and argue that tenure vests in individuals and families and the associations they choose to form. It should present itself as the force that will stop the theft of land in the name of its restitution." BD Live

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Utterly shameless and amoral

"Since 2010 Britain has also sold arms to 39 of the 51 countries ranked “not free” on the Freedom House "Freedom in the world" report, and 22 of the 30 countries on the UK Government’s own human rights watch list."

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"An Indian reservation in North Dakota is the site of the largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years. Indigenous people from across the US are living in camps on the Standing Rock reservation as they protest the construction of a new oil pipeline." BBC

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"Conventional plastic bags made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE, the plastic sacks found at grocery stores) had the smallest per-use environmental impact of all those tested. Cotton tote bags, by contrast, exhibited the highest and most severe global-warming potential by far since they require more resources to produce and distribute." Atlantic

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Horrifying as it is, it's fascinating how the logic of prohibition eats itself: First you ban all the drugs that people want to take, so they end up taking mystery pills that are either adulterated or have much more of the active substance then they want to take. Then you hold venues responsible for harms that occur on their premises, so shutting down the places where people will at least be in public and have access to help when they're taking mystery pills. Then I guess you criminalise whatever the next thing is?

In the end, I see it's all just going to be luxury flats as far as the eye can see, with people in those flats dying from overdoses, alone.

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"I got a phone call from a reporter from that city, who, in the most serious and grave voice told me, "We've got a report that Super Soakers are being used in drive-by shootings, and we were wondering if you had any comment." I had no idea what to say to him. In the end, I said, "Well… you know… I think we should have more of that." In the back of my mind, I felt that my work on toy guns was probably less harmful than the work I did on real weapons systems." BBC

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Music written down 3400 years ago

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The other evening a friend and I were walking along the sidewalk across the road from a park, when we noticed a small cat standing on the edge of the curb watching the road. We inferred that it was waiting for a gap in the traffic so that it could cross the street.

Another passerby, also noticing this, thought he would 'help' the cat by repeatedly trying to pet it, despite it consistently resisting contact and moving away from him. We watched as he spent a few minutes basically chasing this little cat around, without it ever getting any closer to its actual destination.

People: It isn't OK to touch animals that don't want to be touched, for the same reason that it isn't OK to touch humans that don't want to be touched. Just because you think it would be fun to touch an animal doesn't automatically mean that the animal will also think that's fun. Animals have their own needs, desires and right to bodily autonomy, and these are separate from our desires in respect of them. Some animals, like cats, aren't even particularly social animals in the way that humans and dogs are, and will tend to find physical contact threatening except in particular circumstances.

Even lots of people who recognise this point regarding keeping animals for meat or other products of their bodies (i.e. it's bad, and we should at least try to minimise the amount that this happens) don't make this connection regarding relationships between humans and animals that are constructed as "affectionate" or even "loving". (Though I think it's interesting how often animals kept for food are portrayed in advertising as anthropomorphic and even friendly - there's clearly a very strong implicit desire to believe that they get as much pleasure from their relationship to us as we do).

To repeat: While domestic animals *may* enjoy physical contact with you, and even feel affection for you, this does not follow *automatically* from the fact that you feel this way about them. If you want to keep pets, actually try to observe what *they* want out of any interaction with you, if they want any interaction at all.

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Gosh

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"So, why are so many BASE jumpers dying? “The simplest answer is wingsuits,” says Webb. “Right now, wingsuit BASE jumping is, globally, the hottest thing going for the impressionable, 18- to 35-year-old single-male demographic.”" National Geographic

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It's shameful that people with opioid dependencies are still having to rely on black market heroin, where the purity is usually unknown and the supply is often irregular (meaning that people's tolerance can decrease during a 'drought' and making them more prone to overdose). Prescribing heroin would probably eliminate the vast majority of fatalities. However, until that enlightened day arrives, naloxone should be distributed far and wide.

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Just discovered that these are a thing :)

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The face of immigration enforcement in the UK

"Among those rounded up to be removed are a former soldier who served in the British army, a father of three who arrived in the UK aged four, and one who had arrived to sign in with his baby in a pushchair. While detaining him, the Home Office called social services to take his baby."

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Great throughout, worth reading in full!

"The UN’s intervention into the anticolonial movement happened first, and by the time the UN did the same thing with the women's movement they had a tested practice. They created a new class of ‘global’ feminists, going here and there to international institutional gatherings, where they spent nights debating over the wordings of documents. They created new agendas that appropriated the feminist language but discarded its subversive content." Mask

Links, Thursday 1st September

Well shit. There's now a very serious danger of yellow fever taking hold in Kinshasa, a city of 10 million people :( :(

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"The first “gold standard” clinical trial of ketamine for the ongoing treatment of major depression was launched in Sydney on Tuesday and will involve seven research institutions and 200 patients from across Australia and New Zealand." Guardian

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Fascinating account of the minibus taxis that ply the outlying suburbs of NYC. We're quite used to seeing these in developing countries, but it seems they're an effective solution whenever public transport infrastructure has been neglected.

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A timely reminder that a lot of the fuss about testosterone levels in women's athletics is pure racism. It's basically only women of colour who are subjected to this sort of snide commentary.

[CN: some of the blatantly racist comments are reproduced in the article]

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Apologies for the cis-sexist language in this article, but there's some useful harm reduction information in there. Basically, people with relatively more oestrogen in their system tend to be more sensitive to the effects of MDMA, and sensitivity can be affected by the menstrual cycle.

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Not sure how sound a piece of biblical scholarship this is, but it's a cool thought

"The Israelites took the transgender trope from their surrounding cultures and wove it into their own sacred scripture. The four-Hebrew-letter name of God, which scholars refer to as the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, was probably not pronounced “Jehovah” or “Yahweh,” as some have guessed. The Israelite priests would have read the letters in reverse as Hu/Hi — in other words, the hidden name of God was Hebrew for “He/She.” Counter to everything we grew up believing, the God of Israel — the God of the three monotheistic, Abrahamic religions to which fully half the people on the planet today belong — was understood by its earliest worshipers to be a dual-gendered deity."

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"Only after the fact—when it no longer required vision or courage or personal sacrifice; when the Civil War was over and the effort to distance ourselves from the moral stain of slavery had begun—did large numbers of white Americans grow interested in being part of the story of African-American liberation." New Yorker

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Annoying that this presumes (monogamous) marriage as the default form of long-term romantic relationship, but there's some good insight in there.

"The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures."

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"Long depicted as a controversial figure caught between two competing worlds of the Dutch and the Khoi‚ Krotoa is also credited with being among the chief architects of the Afrikaans language" Times Live

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I think a lot of people who eat meat like to pretend to themselves that animals in modern, industrialised slaughterhouses are killed in a basically humane way. I'm sorry, but this is not the case, and never has been.

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Ugh, horrible but predictable that the gentrification of Woodstock is leading to evictions on this scale :(

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A good round-up of some of the current state of knowledge about dental best practice

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This is some useful advice for dealing with harassment in a public place